Some soap pictures for you!
The first is a couple of well-cured soaps from a few months ago. I like this photo because it shows the extreme ends of the range of textures achievable in handmade soaps. The purple soap dusted with gold mica shows the texture of a rebatched soap, if I don’t plane the edges after hardening. I rebatched this with the oven method because the original clary sage blend soap wasn’t cosmetically quite as I’d planned.
Rebatching involves grating the soap (a food processor comes in very handy here), then melting it very very slowly with a little added liquid - I like coconut milk. I rebatch in a large lidded Corningware dish in a very slow oven. Others use a double boiler, crockpot, or even a bag in boiling water. When the soap is well melted, it becomes translucent and developed a “mashed potato” texture. At that point I squodge it into molds, then wait until it hardens to pop it out.
The goddess shows the fine-grained, glowing texture that can be achieved with straight cold process soap. I get all my safety precautions in place, warm my oil to body temperature, mix the lye solution in, blend with a stick blender until trace (when the liquid emulsion becomes more pudding-like in texture), add colour and fragrance, then pour into molds, and put it to bed in blankets through gel phase[1]. This soap has just a little Pomegranate fragrance oil added.
